There's a looming threat to Internet commerce and general Web usage the world over. The underlying protocols that the modern Internet is built upon are inadequate to the task of providing secure and reliable packet traffic. Because the world is growing more dependent on the Internet for more aspects of business, government, communications, and broad societal functions, this vulnerability to criminal and terrorist attack could have dire consequences. This all according to Professor Tom Leighton, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Akamai Technologies. He's also professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT and -- especially in the context of this discussion -- the former chairman of the Cyber Security Sub-Committee of the U.S. President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC). In this Akamai-sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, Leighton and show moderator Dana Gardner explore the situation around cyber security, and what needs to be done by both the business community and U.S. government to reduce the risk to the global Internet infrastructure. While the U.S. government has cut basic research into creating the next generations of Internet technology, a time bomb of potentially catastrophic proportions is ticking away. Have a listen to the podcast, or read the transcript at http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2006/06/full-transcript-of-dana-gardners.html.

Eclipse is being used by two-thirds of Java shops today, and has taken the market for IDEs by storm over the last two years. Part of that adoption growth has been due to large ISVs dropping their own IDEs in favor of Eclipse. But why would they do that? I recently moderated a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the impact of Eclipse Foundation on the development market -- taking a look at infrastructure ISVs, those large vendors that are using Eclipse instead of their own development environments, and why. Joining me on the podcast are representatives from two major software vendors: From BEA Systems, Bill Roth, the vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit, and from Wind River, Steve Heintz, the director of product management for developer technologies. Have a listen as we learn why very different large software tools, platform, and runtimes providers are hip to Eclipse. And they also see Eclipse as a model of other software projects to come. In addition to listening, feel free to look over the full transcript at http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2006/06/transcript-of-briefingsdirect-podcast.html. Podcast sponsor: Eclipse Foundation.

Selling SOA economics inside of enterprises is as important as executing on SOA deployments. Learn how to begin the analysis. Join executives from Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) Consulting and Integration Division for a high-level discussion on making the business case for SOA. Terri Bennett Schoenrock, executive director of SOA services and consulting integration and J2EE open source programs, along with Andrew Pugsley, worldwide lead for SOA service development, join Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, to examine the pay-offs and opportunities from moving to SOA, ramping-up with HP's assessment processes and advacement methodologies, as well as some user-case studies on how to measure success. Podcast sponsor: HP.

The Eclipse Foundation has grown in popularity for the past two or three years and really is on the cutting edge in de facto standards for development environments for major Java software projects, particularly among software companies themselves. To discuss this subject, we have Brent Williams, a Senior Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets. Eclipse started out as an integrated development environment (IDE), but is branching out into some other areas to offer the best of both worlds in terms of commercial command-and-control development, as well as the viral and lower-cost development of the open source community approach. Podcast sponsor: Eclipse Foundation.